The Stock Market is a Feed Lot
Sep
21
Written by:
9/21/2008 12:31 PM
All it took to make me hit the epiphany button was one look at Kevin Phillips’ face last Friday on television. Now, before listening to me belabor the epiphany, permit a correction: the “stock market” is just the portion of the financial sector you can smell. What Phillips was trying to swallow was the entire enchilada. I’ll now labor to rise above mismetaphor in order to think on survival of the consumers in the feed lot.
No cutting nor slicing of the current financial salami makes it comprehensible to me the public. Both pundits and fundits mislead us into thinking that there is a financial explanation of, if not solution to, this uh, let’s face it, tsulami. There isn’t. What masquerades as explanation is a laundry list of symptoms. The true explanation is that when we went off the wampum standard we set off on a “dark and unknown road” (Steve Fraser). Okay it was gold, but I’m trying to make a point. What passes for a dollar these days is somewhere between a memory and a figment.
If you want to read the best cut and slice job go to Michael Hudson’s article in Counterpunch, a link to which is in last week’s Greener Times.
To the dollar then. Let’s try on an analogy that may not help but sounds helpful: the dollar is like a complex number, the sum of a real part and an imaginary part. What keeps the parts separate is the square root of minus one, written j, which is imaginary; there ain’t no such thing. So, in analogy street dollars are composed of real dollars plus j feedlot dollars. Now here’s how the analogy breaks down. Whereas in physical science where law is omnipotent, imaginary numbers have become indispensable to understanding the nature of matter, in the feedlot where law is a joke imaginary dollars have allowed insiders to steal real dollars from the public. This analogy may or may not help to plot survival, but it may convince you and me that we have to begin the plot by cutting ourselves adrift from Wall Street and every stripe of pinsuit in it: the financial sector is a diabolical invention for legal robbery.
Time now to saw off the column’s attempt at literary fame and make the point. I think we should cash out. I think that the most likely end of the unknown path is total failure of the present financial system including social security. I think family and community should circle their wagons against the system and make ready to give succor to the less fortunate.